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Volume
29 -
Issue
1
-
February 2002

Editorial

While it has not been my policy to carry obituaries in the Journal, I would
like to note, with deep sorrow, the tragically early death of Peter Jusczyk and
to celebrate his major contributions to our field.

I am pleased to announce that the Journal is moving to four issues per year
which I hope will help us to publish accepted articles somewhat faster.

I would like to welcome Edith Bavin of La Trobe University as a new
Associate Editor. In addition we are also appointing a Statistics Consultant,
Glyn Collis, of Warwick University, to assist the action editors when
necessary.

We are continuing to publish at least one major Review and Commentary
section a year. The next will appear in Issue 2 of this year and will consist of
a review article by Dorit Ravid and Liliana Tolchinsky entitled: ‘Developing
linguistic literacy: a comprehensive model’ together with a number of
commentaries.

Finally, while we prefer not to include formal thanks for our editorial work
in the acknowledgement sections of papers unless our contribution has been
scientific and/or intellectual, but we are highly appreciative of feedback in
correspondence with authors and reviewers.

Specific relationships between verbal and nonverbal aspects of caregiver attention-focusing events and later verbal IQ were investigated for a risk sample of 26 very low birthweight [VLBW], preterm [PT] children. Videotaped interactions between VLBW, PT children at 2;0 and their caregivers were coded for caregiver attention-focusing speech and/or caregiver attention-focusing gestures (display, demonstration and pointing), caregiver gesture–speech combinations, and for child attention-sharing through gesture and social gaze. To investigate the specific effects of caregiver and child interactional factors, analyses statistically controlled for cognitive status. Simultaneous multiple regression analyses found that overall caregiver attention-focusing involving gesture, child attention-sharing behaviours, and cognitive status each significantly and uniquely contributed to verbal IQ at 3;0. Further analyses contrasted the contributions of caregiver gesture with relevant descriptive speech, caregiver gesture with no speech/nondescriptive speech, and caregiver pointing. Results of these analyses suggest that caregiver gesture with relevant descriptive speech makes a unique and positive contribution to later language performance.

The effects of maternal interactive styles on the production of referential communication were assessed in four groups of infants whose chronological ages ranged between 0;6 and 1;8. Two groups of infants with Down syndrome (DS), one (n = 11) with a mean mental age (MA) of 0;8.6, and the other (n = 11) of 1;4.5, were matched on MA with two groups (n = 10 each) of typically developing infants. Infants were seen bi-monthly, for 8 months, with mothers, same-aged peers, and mothers of the peers. Results showed that High MA non-Down syndrome (ND) infants produced more words, and High MA DS infants produced more gestures when playing with mothers than peers. Mothers exhibited more attentional maintaining behaviours than peers, in particular to High MA infants, but they redirected the attentional focus of Low MA infants more. Sequential loglinear analyses revealed interesting contingencies between the interactive strategies of mothers and the referential communicative behaviours of their infants. Whereas maintaining attention increased, redirecting attention decreased the likelihood of the production of gestures and words in children. However, redirecting attention was followed by maintaining attention. Thus, mothers redirect the attentional focus in order to promote joint attention and referential communication. Furthermore, words and gestures of the children also promote joint attention in mothers. This highlights the reciprocal nature of these dynamic communicative interactions.

Two experiments investigated the factors that govern children's use of singular and plural forms of count nouns. Experiment 1 used an elicited production task to investigate whether children use referential and/or syntactic information to determine the form of the count nouns when the two sources of information conflict (e.g. each x, one of the xs), as well as when the linguistic context does not provide any constraint on the form of the noun, but the referential context does (e.g. the dog(s)). 48 children, aged 1;9 to 5;6, participated in Experiment 1. The results suggest that even the youngest children can use referential information when relevant, and can ignore referential information when necessary. Children did, however, show a tendency to make errors with the quantifier each in non-partitive contexts, and a developmental trend was found in the use and avoidance of each in non-partitive contexts. Experiment 2, an act out task, provided a second test of the role of referential information in children's use of singular and plural forms. Experiment 2 also investigated children's appreciation of the semantic distinction between each and all. 48 children, aged 1;8 to 5;6, participated in Experiment 2. A weak sensitivity to the semantic distinction between the two quantifiers as well as the syntactic context in which they were used was found. The results of the two experiments suggest that, from the beginning, children approach the task of learning when to use singular and plural forms of count nouns on the basis of morpho-syntactic, semantic, and referential properties of utterances, rather than initially using only one of these types of information.

Many recent generativist models attribute grammatical knowledge to young children on the basis that children's language patterns the same way as the target adult language. It has been proposed that the child acquires this knowledge early on in development by a process of parameter setting. Wexler (1996) presents the VERY EARLY PARAMETER SETTING HYPOTHESIS (VEPS), which suggests that basic language-specific parameters are set correctly at the earliest observable stages, that is, from the onset of multi-word speech. However, the patterns predicted by VEPS are necessarily a characteristic feature of the input language and could therefore be just as readily explained in more limited scope terms. A good example of this is French negation where, in order to perform correctly, the child simply has to register that certain lexical forms precede the negative particle pas and certain other forms follow it. One implication of such a limited scope account is that there should be a strong relation between the lexical specificity of children's and mothers' use of verbs before and after pas. We present data for one subject, aged from 2;1 to 2;8, that are compatible with this hypothesis. While these data do not count directly against VEPS, they do suggest that the very low frequency of errors in children's use of French negation does not in and of itself constitute evidence for early syntactic knowledge.

This study assesses children's understanding of the Italian modal verbs dovere (must) and potere (may) in their dual function of qualification of the speaker's beliefs (epistemic modality) and behaviour regulation (deontic modality). 192 children and 60 adults participated in the experiment. Children aged 3;0 to 9;2 were presented with two tasks: one assessed their understanding of modal expressions in the epistemic domain – looking for an object by following the information contained in a sentence; the other assessed their understanding of modal expressions in the deontic domain – acting according to obligations, permissions and prohibitions in the context of a game. Half of the subjects carried out the tasks in a single-sentence format and half carried out the tasks in a double-sentence format. In the single-sentence format the subjects had to follow the directions supplied by a modalized sentence; in the double-sentence format they had to follow the directions supplied by the sentence containing the stronger modal verb. Our results show that the understanding of deontic modal forms precedes the understanding of epistemic modal forms and that a full understanding of the strength of different modal forms is achieved only at eight years.

This study investigated the role that agency information plays in children's early interpretations of grammatical aspect morphology, in particular, the progressive -ing and simple past forms. Fifty-nine children (two-, four- and five-year olds) were presented with a forced-choice sentence-to-scene matching task very similar to the one used by Weist and colleagues (Weist, 1991; Weist, Wysocka & Lyytinen, 1991; Weist, Lyytinen, Wysocka & Atanassova, 1997), except that here the scenes contained only information about the relative completion of the object of the event and no information about the state of the agent of the event. In contrast to previous research, the children here did not succeed at this object-oriented task until as late as age five; moreover, also contra previous work, when they did succeed, their performance tracked the formal entailments of grammatical aspect. Thus, subjects consistently matched the perfective sentence to the completed event (reflecting the perfective's entailment of completion) but never consistently matched the imperfective sentence to either scene (reflecting the imperfective's lack of entailments). It is argued that agent-oriented meaning, in particular, intentionality, has priority in the mapping process over object-oriented completion entailments.

According to a developmental model of figurative language acquisition – the GLOBAL ELABORATION MODEL (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995) – the metalinguistic awareness necessary to use figurative language in a creative way is acquired late, and is subsequent to the ability to comprehend and produce figurative expressions. One hundred and eight children aged 9;6, one hundred and twenty-four children aged 11;3, one hundred and twelve adolescents aged 18;5 and one hundred adults participated in Experiment 1 which studied the development of metalinguistic awareness through an elicitation task. The subjects produced a high percentage of figurative expressions with a clear developmental trend that is concluded in adolescence. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that the production of comprehensible, appropriate and novel metaphors, as they were rated by adult judges, also increased with age. These results show that the ability to use figurative language in a creative and sensible way requires a long developmental time span and is strictly connected with the ability to reflect on language as a complex cognitive and interpersonal phenomenon.

Two recent papers Wexler, Schütze & Rice (1998) and Rispoli (1999a) reach different conclusions concerning the relationship between finiteness marking and pronoun case errors. Wexler et al. claim they are linked, whereas Rispoli finds little evidence for such a linkage. Wexler et al. discounted data from children who made pronoun case errors in 100% of their attempts at a subject pronoun, whereas Rispoli (1999a) included data from such children. This methodological difference may account for our differing conclusions. Schütze (2001) defends the omission of these data, claiming that children who make a pronoun case error 100% of the time do so because the correct pronoun case form is not in the child's productive inventory. Longitudinal data is presented showing the inadequacy of this assumption. Children may err without variation AFTER a period of variation, indicating that these children have knowledge of the correct form. Apparent methodological differences between the two papers reveal deeper theoretical biases. The paradigm building approach taken by Rispoli views longitudinal variation of this sort as a reflection of lexical retrieval principles at work in a developing paradigm. In contrast, the Agr/Tns Omission Model of Wexler et al. finds such variation an uncomfortable inconvenience.

Rowland & Pine (2000) present an analysis of the development of subject–auxiliary inversion in wh-questions in the speech of Adam from the Brown corpus. They show that there is an uninversion period in which the child fails to invert the subject and auxiliary in wh-questions, and they argue that this is a function of the frequency of wh-word+auxiliary collocations in the input: the more frequent a particular collocation is in the input, the more likely it is to be inverted in the child's speech. In this note an alternative analysis is proposed: the initial position of the tensed auxiliary signals interrogative illocutionary force, and the auxiliaries which are most reliably inverted are those that are overtly tensed morphologically. This analysis not only accounts for Rowland & Pine's data but also extends to inversion in yes–no questions. The analysis predicts three different patterns for the development of inversion in both types of questions, and it is shown that all three are attested.

Interpretation of relative clauses sentences was investigated by having sixteen children between the ages of 3;5 and 4;6 act out sentences within four conditions that varied the number of potential referents for each noun within the sentence. No difference in interpretation accuracy was found between felicitous and infelicitous conditions or between biased and neutral conditions. This result raises problems for the view that children of this age know the pragmatic principles for interpreting relative clauses.

This study examined developmental change in the word association task as reading acquisition occurred. Syntagmatic responses follow the stimulus word in discourse, ‘cold’ – ‘outside’, while paradigmatic associates are of the same form class, ‘cold’ – ‘hot’. Some 59 children were tested three times during the school year. The average age of the younger group was 5;4, and the older group, 6;2 at the October test. They were given the PPVT, the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test, and a word association task. The younger group gave an increasing number of rhyming responses and the older group gave more paradigmatic responses as the year progressed. Regression analyses with the older group attributed this to reading acquisition. The changing nature of the cognitive representation of words as reading acquisition took place was discussed.